Dir. Eric Barbier, France , 2006, 121 mins, French with subtitles
Genre: Thriller / World
Cast: Yvan Attal, Clovis Cornillac, Minna Haapkyla
Review by Carol Allen
The French have a particular flair for character based thrillers, where the psychology of the characters is as important as the plot. They are also often based on English language novels, with Ruth Rendell being a particular favourite (two of her novels filmed by Chabrol, one by Claude Miller). For his source material writer/director Barbier has turned here to another British writer, Ted Lewis, author of the book on which the film "Get Carter" was based. Lewis's character Pender is the serpent of this movie.
Vincent Mandel (Attal) is a successful fashion photographer in the midst of an acrimonious divorce and custody battle for his beloved children. As if that wasn't enough, he's then the victim of an apparent blackmail scam, when Sofia (Olga Kurylenko) poses as a replacement model for a photographic session and then falsely accuses him of rape. Things get worse when she turns up again, drugs him and he is posed in a series of compromising photographs and turn catastrophic, when she meets with a fatal accident in his studio. We know but he doesn't that the man behind all this is Pender (Cornillac). A former schoolmate of Vincent, Pender stages an "accidental" encounter to reintroduce himself, disposes of Sofia's body without Vincent's knowledge and under the guise of old school friendship, insinuates himself into the life of Vincent and his wife Helene (Haapkyla). The story is reminiscent in this respect of another French thriller Harry, He's Here to Help. As the plot thickens and Vincent finds himself eventually on the run, framed for a murder he didn't commit, we realise that Pender is out for revenge for a cruel schoolboy prank Vincent played on him, when they were young and which went tragically wrong.
For most of its duration this is an efficient and engrossing psychological thriller with a well thought out plot, plenty of twists and a decent ration of edge of the seat moments. Attal, who looks like a cross between Daniel Auteuil and Dustin Hoffman, is effective as the bewildered Vincent, caught up in a threatening situation he doesn't understand, while Cornillac is effectively two faced as Pender, convincingly masking his ruthlessness under a creepily jovial manner. Simon Abkarian plays Vincent's lawyer Sam and Jean Claude Bouillon the seasoned retired detective, who both try to help Vincent prove his innocence. The well filmed action sequence, where Vincent escapes from the police and parts of the otherwise gripping climax, when the police again, armed this time, are making like Los Angeles cops, seem a little out of key with the rest of the movie, but overall, while not quite in the Chabrol class, this is a well made and creditable addition to the French thriller genre.
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